God is sovereign,” a youth pastor told some children. “That means He controls everything that happens.” Puzzled by this, one child asked, “So God was in control when my dog died? Why would God kill my dog?”

“That’s a tough one,” the youth pastor replied. “But sometimes God lets us go through hard times so that we’re prepared for even more difficult things in the future. I remember how hard it was when my dog died. But going through that helped me deal with an even more difficult time later, when my grandma died. Does that make sense?”

After thinking about this for a moment, the middle schooler replied: “So God killed my dog to prepare me for when He’s going to kill my grandma?”

1. Troubling Questions

At times, how we think and talk about the way God governs the world (God’s providence) creates troubling questions in people’s minds. Does everything happen exactly the way God wants? If so, what about evil? And why should we pray if everything happens the way God wills?

2. “All things work together for good to those who love God,” Paul writes in Romans 8:28.

But these words are often misunderstood. Do they mean that everything that happens is good or that everything happens precisely the way God wants?

Certainly not.

God Does Not Always Get What He Wants.

Numerous other biblical passages indicate that many things occur that God does not want to occur. For example, in Isaiah 66:4 God laments over His people’s choices contrary to His desires: “When I called, no one answered, when I spoke they did not hear; but they did evil before My eyes, and chose that in which I do not delight” (see also Isaiah 65:12; Jeremiah 19:5). Earlier in Isaiah, God “longs to be gracious” to His people and “waits on high to have compassion,” but they were “not willing” (Isaiah 30:18, 15, NASB). Likewise, in Ezekiel, God laments that His people “will not listen to Me” (Ezekiel 3:7).

And God cries out in Psalm 81:11-13: “My people would not heed My voice, and Israel would have none of Me. So I gave them over to their own stubborn heart, to walk in their own counsels. Oh, that My people would listen to Me, that Israel would walk in My ways!” This sounds strikingly similar to Jesus’ later expression of distress over His chosen people’s decisions that were contrary to His will, rejecting what He wanted for them: “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the one who kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her! How often I wanted to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing!” (Matthew 22:37).

Simply put, God does not always get what He wants. Accordingly, Luke directly indicates that God’s will might be rejected, saying, “The Pharisees and lawyers rejected the will of God for themselves, not having been baptized by him” (Luke 7:30;  compare Mark 7:24).

In fact, very frequently what occurs is directly contrary to what God prefers. To take one final example, the Bible repeatedly teaches that God wants to save every single person (see 1 Timothy. 2:4-6). God is “not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance” (2 Peter 3:9). But, tragically, some refuse to be saved. In these and other cases God’s will goes unfulfilled.

But how could this be? Isn’t God all-powerful? And doesn’t the Bible also teach that God “works all things according to the counsel of His will” (Ephesians 1:11)? How, then, could it be possible that God does not always get what He wants?

The texts surveyed earlier (and many others) show that creatures often do otherwise than what God prefers. This, however, could be possible only if God consistently grants humans the ability to freely act in ways that are contrary to what He prefers (that is, contrary to what I call His ideal will).

God is all-powerful (see, e.g., Jeremiah 32:17; Revelation. 19:6). He must, then, be powerful enough to make everyone always do what He prefers. But God does not do so. Why? Because doing so would exclude the greatest value in all the universe: love.

Think about it. Suppose you possessed the power to control all the thoughts of someone you love. Could you make that person love you? No. You could make them display the outward signs of love and even make them think they love you, but you would know they did not actually love you. Why? Because love must be freely given and freely received.

God’s Ideal Will and God’s Remedial Will

Yet, if God’s will is often unfulfilled, how can it also be true that God “works all things according to the counsel of His will” (Ephesians 1:11)? To understand this, we need to understand a few concepts that help us see how these pieces of Scripture fit together harmoniously.

3. First, imagine everything that God ideally wills for the entirety of His beloved creation.

 Is there any evil in it? No. Everything is perfect. If God’s ideal will always take place, everyone would always do what God prefers. Sadly, however, people often do the very opposite of what God prefers, acting contrary to God’s ideal will.

Yet, being exceedingly gracious, God does not give up on this world. He does not give up on you and me. In response to sin, God has a plan to remedy all that has gone wrong. I call this plan God’s remedial will. This remedial plan of God’s takes into account all the free decisions of creatures, including the bad ones, and works to bring the best outcomes possible in light of those free decisions.

Imagine a cooking competition in which chefs are allowed to make a dish of their choice, but the rules specify that the dish must include a set of particular ingredients. The chefs can add whatever other ingredients they choose to make whatever dish they want as long as the final product includes the set of ingredients specified by the rules. The chef’s final dish will include many ingredients the chef chose, but also ingredients the chef did not choose and may not prefer.

Similarly, God’s remedial will includes many “ingredients” that God does not prefer. Specifically, it includes all the freewill decisions of creatures, including the many bad ones that are contrary to God’s ideal will. Because God has committed Himself to consistently grant creatures free will (for the sake of love, because doing otherwise would destroy love itself), creatures’ free decisions are not up to God. They are “ingredients” that God does not directly cause or control. But God adds His own decisions in response, working to remedy all situations as much as possible without negating the free will that love requires.

With this understanding of God’s remedial will in mind, we can understand what Ephesians 1:11 means when it says God “works all things according to the counsel of His will.” This cannot mean that God makes everything happen as He ideally wills, for we have already seen that many things occur that are contrary to God’s ideal will. Yet it makes perfect sense if we understand that this verse refers to God’s remedial will. God “works all things according to the counsel of His [remedial] will”—His plan to eventually remedy all that has gone wrong.

At this point, one might also wonder about the meaning of an earlier phrase in Ephesians 1:11, in which Paul speaks of those who “obtained an inheritance, being predestined according to the purpose of Him who works all things according to the counsel of His will.”

Does that term mean that God causes or determines things to happen just as He wants—including causing or determining the decisions and actions of humans? No, the biblical term does not mean that.

The term translated “predestined” in Ephesians 1:11 (and elsewhere in the New Testament) is a compound term in Greek that simply means to “decide beforehand.”

4. Of course, you can decide something beforehand entirely by yourself (that is, unilaterally), or you can decide something beforehand in a way that takes into account the free decisions of others. For instance, I decided beforehand to write this article, but I did not decide this by myself. I also took into account the decisions of other team members here at the Review.

The word translated “predestined,” then, simply means that God decided something beforehand. This is consistent with understanding this passage in terms of God’s remedial will. Understood this way, the passage is speaking about God deciding beforehand a plan that includes how He will respond to the free decisions of creatures in order to bring about the best outcomes possible for all concerned.

Conclusion

This understanding that many things occur that God does not want to occur holds many practical implications for how we understand God’s character and view the events that happen to us and around us. The next time you or someone you love is confronted with some challenges, do not assume that God wants this for you. It is true that God can use hardships to teach us lessons and help us grow (see, e.g., Romans. 5:3-5), but God does not want us to suffer, and if everything always occurred as God ideally wills, neither you nor I nor anyone else would suffer.

God did not want any evil to ever occur in the first place. But tragically, creatures misused their free will to do evil. God, however, does not give up on us, but makes plans and carries out those plans to counteract evil and bring about good in the end (Romans 8:28; cf. verse 18).

Soon God will eliminate evil forevermore. “God will wipe away every tear . . . ; there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying. There shall be no more pain, for the former things have passed away” (Revelation 21:4).

In the meantime, we can and should do our part to do something about those evils that we can remedy within our sphere of influence—feeding the poor, helping the sick, visiting the imprisoned, comforting the abused and downtrodden, and so on (see Matthew 25:31-46).

Many things occur that God does not want to occur, and we are called to be a light in a dark world that is far from God’s ideal will, but one day soon we will be restored to God’s ideal will, with no more tears or suffering or death forevermore.

1 Marc Cortez shared this on his Everyday Theology blog in June 2013, which can no longer be accessed. Some of Cortez’s original post is quoted here: https://nleaven.wordpress.com/2013/06/19/3-mistakes-we-

make-when-talking-about-the-sovereignty-of-god/.

Be encouraged